Highly efficient oil-in-water emulsion separation based on innovative stannic oxide/polyvinylchloride (SnO2/PVC) microfiltration membranes

Abstract

Global awareness has been raised to tackle the impact of produced water effluents from the oil and gas industries on the environment. In this work, innovative stannic oxide/polyvinylchloride (SnO₂/PVC) microfiltration membranes were fabricated via the phase inversion method and their properties and performance were studied. Six membranes consisting of a fixed PVC concentration of 15 wt%, and varying loading of SnO₂ nanoparticles (SnO₂NPs) of 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 1, and 1.5 wt% were cast. The results showed that embedding SnO₂NPs outstandingly increased the pure water flux from 40.03 L/m².h for the pristine PVC membrane to 104.06 L/m².h for the 1 wt% SnO₂NPs/PVC membrane when the oil in water feed concentration was 100 mg/L. This was attributed to enhancing the comprehensive porosity and hydrophilicity of the membranes as well as improving their grifted negative charge. Additionally, the maximum rejection of oil as COD and NTU removal percent achieved by the 1 wt% SnO₂NPs/PVC membrane were around 99.6 % and 99.3 % respectively, compared to 83.29 % and 86.11 % using the pristine PVC membrane. Finally, the surface roughness decreased from 18.45 to 8.59 nm with adding SnO₂NPs which positively improved the fouling resistance of the membranes as confirmed by obtaining low relative flux reduction and high flux recovery ratio.